David Cameron wants Google to "hold a hackathon for child safety."

Earlier this year, we reported on the United Kingdom’s plans to regulate online pornography, specifically at the ISP level. At present, the United Kingdom’s top four ISPs (BT, Sky, TalkTalk and Virgin)—who collectively serve 88 percent of British Internet users—impose varying levels of opt-in porn filtering, but only for new customers.

Prime Minister David Cameron says that’s not enough. In a speech on Monday at the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, a nonprofit group in London, the UK leader said that he had a “clear message” for Google, Bing, and other major search engines. “You have a duty to act on this—and it is a moral duty,” he said. “I simply don’t accept the argument that some of these companies have used to say that these searches should be allowed because of freedom of speech.”

Cameron wants search engines to impose a blacklist of search terms that Child Exploitation and Online Protection (CEOP), a division of British law enforcement, would provide. The prime minister also demanded an update from these companies by October 2013.

“If in October we don’t like the answer we’re given to this question, if the progress is slow or nonexistent, then I can tell you we are already looking at the legislative options we have to force action,” Cameron said.

“And there’s a further message I have for the search engines. If there are technical obstacles to acting on this, don’t just stand by and say nothing can be done; use your great brains to help overcome them. You’re the people who have worked out how to map almost every inch of the earth from space, who have developed algorithms that make sense of vast quantities of information. You’re the people who take pride in doing what they say can’t be done. You hold hackathons for people to solve impossible Internet conundrums. Well—hold a hackathon for child safety. Set your greatest brains to work on this. You are not separate from our society, you are part of our society, and you must play a responsible role in it.”

Representatives from Google and Microsoft did not immediately respond to our request for comment.

Cameron added that as soon as next month, 90 percent of public, commercial Wi-Fi networks across the UK would also include “family-friendly filters,” a plan that another children’s charity, the Mother’s Union, had previously told Ars that it would like to see put into place.

“And we are keen to introduce a 'Family Friendly Wi-Fi' symbol which retailers, hotels, and transport companies can use to show their customers that their public Wi-Fi is filtered,” Cameron added. “That is how we’re protecting children outside of the home.”

UPDATE 3:03pm CT: A Google spokesperson wrote to Ars with this statement, without addressing Cameron's specific points on the blacklist and the hackathon: “We have a zero tolerance attitude to child sexual abuse imagery. We use our own systems and work with child safety experts to find it, remove and report it. We recently donated $5 million to groups working to combat this problem and are committed to continuing the dialogue with the Government on these issues."

A hackathon for child safety, huh? Absent some sort of device connected to your cellphone that gives you an electric shock every time your internet connection is used to access porn, I don't think anything else will get the point across to "it's for the children" advocates: it's not your ISP's job to raise your kids.

A hackathon for child safety, huh? Absent some sort of device connected to your cellphone that gives you an electric shock every time your internet connection is used to access porn, I don't think anything else will get the point across to "it's for the children" advocates: it's not your ISP's job to raise your kids.

he already has the ISPs doing this for 'new' customers. If he wants it done he shouldnt be doing it at the search level(google/bing/etc.) he should get the ISPs to continue the plan for existing customers.

This kind of nonsense is why constitutionally guaranteed freedom of speech is important.

Keyword based blocking is ineffective and inaccurate, and there's no way to fix either of those. In my almost 20 years of using the internet, I have never once "stumbled" onto porn using a search engine, it just doesn't happen. If people are actively searching for porn, then it's none of the government's business. If you are trying to prevent child abuse and the creation of child porn, then you go after the creators and distributors, not set up filters.

Wait wait, I have a better idea, how about parents actually monitor their children's internet usage? Or allow exisintkng customers to opt-in on the filter? Or use ad-blockers since there are tons of porn ads you can see without searching for them and you can't really stumble via searching into pron. Or maybe have parents teach children how to safety navigate te web an keep them off until they learn how to use it properly?

A sinple youtube tutorial sent to parents on how to parent and teach their kids about the internet would likely be cheaper and more effective. But that means the politicans can't do any grandstanding since the issue woul be solved so quickly. Also means they can't censor / figure out a way to filter internet which they can extend in the future.

the new laws also make it a crime to possess simulated rape porn--emphasis on simulated. the argument is that it will help reduce violence against women as some men supposedly use simulated rape vids to plan their attacks. by that logic, they should ban all videos and images of simulated violence because one could use a scene from a movie as inspiration to carry out an attack in real life. thing is, given the subject matter, I doubt anyone will stand up and say, "we want simulated rape porn!" so, something else will have to happen to undo this nonsense.

I like where this is going. First you make people opt in to see porn. Then you let it leak that anyone that opts in will be watched as a potential criminal. Then you quietly mark anything you don't want people to see or know as porn. If knowledge is power; he who control access to knowledge, controls access to power.

to be fair, im pretty sure their version of free speech is very different than the US's version.

Until very recently we barely had any legal right to free speech. Like a lot of UK law, it's all just done on a sort of "well, we've done it for years without ever writing it down so let's keep doing that"

The European Convention, via the Human Rights Act, actually enshrined freedom of expression into law, but the current government are doing all they can to get that repealed. Because who needs Human Rights, eh?

So there's a possibility that, if you can prove unfettered access to porn is a human right, this legislation (if it becomes such) is illegal.

IANAL, etc.

Cameron is the worst kind of idiot - a Tory idiot who has power (if not an actual majority to democratically mandate the use of that power).

So what is this supposed to do exactly? Congrats, you've blocked porn on public Wi-Fi. You don't think the kids are going to know how to get around that if they really want porn?

And further, the best way to make sure kids have a healthy attitude towards their bodies and sex? Don't hide the truth from them, and instead introduce it to them when they ask in an appropriate way! Don't know how? Ask your child's pediatrician! There are a lot of great resources out there to talk to kids about sex, their bodies, how those bodies are going to change, and sexual health. And those conversations MUST happen (for both boys and girls). Avoiding them puts your kids at risk.

Google / bing / other search engines? should just say ok and pull out. Once you get into a discussion with different word list filters based on what region you are in you are talking about a lot of overhead and a bunch more work. Maybe if their government owned google they could impose rules like this..

Simulated rape is still allowed in 'proper' films though right? So how do they define if a film is just a film, 'art', torture porn, actual porn?

e.g. Irreversible may make for uncomfortable viewing but I've never seen it classed as porn? Would rape simultaion be okay if they wrap it in more bad cliched acting* so they could claim it was a film?

*I'm not saying this of Irreversible, I'm saying it of porn...or so I've heard... a friend told me etc. etc.

Speaking as someone who spent adolescence with access to a single family computer on a rarely connected dialup connection, there is no filter that will keep a determined child out. Unless "children" here really refers to anyone under the age of ten, in which case, I think we're addressing a problem I had no idea even existed.

Unless, for some inexplicable reason, Cameron is using the "think of the children" argument to keep porn away from adults. But I can't think of a good reason for any government to have a hand in that either.

Even ignoring the first response that it's unlikely that "the children" suffer actual harm from viewing porn (in fact, it's more likely that by blocking children from it, you probably cause more harm in the future), and even ignoring that this kind of filtering is problematic at best (see the many stories of automatic filters blocking sites reporting on things such as breast cancer), why is this even the government or the ISP's responsibility? Are the parents who are pushing for this so unwilling to care for their own children, and unable to acknowledge that the things they grew up with that they're trying to block were beneficial to their own development?

Maybe parents should stop giving the kids they're so worried about unrestricted access to computing devices, if that's their concern. And what kind of message do they think is being taught to their children when they do this?

And that's even leaving off the table that once this filter is put into place, there's nothing stopping someone from using it for much more then just this.

If this is DNS-level blocking, then fine, I will continue to use OpenDNS to manage my family's net connection and no need to put myself on a list for being "deviant". If it is some sort of deep packet inspection of my traffic then holy frack that is going to be one massive payday for Allot, Bluecoat et al, and slow my already poor ADSL connection to a crawl, unless I sign up to this deviant list (note, I am not calling myself a deviant, but I trust my own filters far more than the Government, and I voted for this shower of shit).

Keyword filtering is pointless. The Chinese have been doing this for years, and still "Grass Mud Horse" exists to battle the River Crabs. People use new keywords to describe things so all this will achieve is that searching for "David Cameron" in Google in a few years will bring up the most hardcore extreme porn imaginable. I have Safesearch locked on my daughters profiles and have tested against any number of searches and have yet to see anything I consider worrisome (other than MovieStar Planet and Moshi Monsters but apparently thats what the kids want to see)

This is purely a sop to the Daily Mail in order to get them onside for the inevitable election campaign that will start once Parliament is recalled in September.

I loath the way Cameron slithers back and forth between two (radically different) implicit assertions as his convenience requires:

When demanding that search engines and ISPs and so forth Must Do Something Because Monstrous! his implicit argument is usually about kiddie porn(and not the cartoon flavor, the kind that implies actual victims), which is difficult to directly argue with, because the consensus that 'kiddie porn is bad, m'kay?' is pretty well established.

However, if somebody actually points out "Um, Dave, you do realize that child pornography is all kinds of illegal, and the supplies of it that are so poorly hidden that googling 'illegal child pornograpy rape crying' will find them should be trivial for the guys with guns and legal authority to deal with." Then it's suddenly all about protecting the poor innocent children from finding and viewing legal adult smut and corrupting their innocent little minds.

Two totally different arguments which, because they can both invoke the phrase 'protecting the children' are cynically conflated and substituted for one another purely as convenience dictates. Want urgency? The horror of kiddy porn compels you! Want plausibility? Did you know that Totally Scientitific Numbers prove that 136% of boys under the age of 16, and 115% of girls, have used a computer to access adult content?

I realize that sheer oleaginous dishonesty is a quality that you'll never live at 10 Downing St. without; but it's still disgusting to watch.

Is kiddie porn bad? Sure. Is it already so illegal that child pornographers aren't...exactly...clamoring for better pagerank? All the ones who don't want to go to jail, obviously.

Is 'children accessing porn they theoretically aren't supposed to' common? I certainly expect so. Is it a problem, much less one of the gravity that would require concerted state action? That's a thesis that would, at least in theory, be defensible; but there's a dearth of actual evidence and a lot of emotional handwaving.

Is there any connection between these two issues, aside from both involving 'children' and 'the internet'? Not so much.

And now a word from the knee jerk committee of England and the house of Lords....

Hopefully the HoL will kick this insanity back to committee if it ever makes there. They may be mostly unelected, but they do know how the world works and the country is better for having them as a defence against the lower house.

Google "CHILD ABUSE", you will get the NSPCC or Childline in page 1, near the top. Which is EXACTLY how it should be. Block people searching for "CHILD ABUSE" and then you make it so much harder for children to find them. This would be bad.

Quite true, but US law (ridiculously) generally considers people children until age 18 (and in the case of alcohol, until 21). Twelve US states have 18 as the age of sexual consent. That's very hard to explain to an 11 year old boy who is taking avid notice of the blooming breasts of his female cohorts and experiencing fierce erections accordingly.